Tag Archives: journalism

Now that the Sad Puppies have failed in their strategy to take over the Hugos by manipulating the nomination process, I thought I could safely ignore the rest of their sci fi and fantasy backlash. But the Wired article I’ve been discussing for several posts tells me I’m wrong. It took some of the terms coined by Sad Puppies and used them with a straight face. Other mass media outlets have done the same.

Some words are sneaky. They say more in connotation than denotation. (In other words, they say more by implication that by direct, concrete meaning.) They become shorthand for a whole set of assumptions. Sometimes digging into their pasts can help illuminate those assumptions. (For an example, see my analysis of the term “political correctness.”)

So let’s take a quick look at what those Sad Puppy words mean, and how they came to be. I’ll cover “trufan,” “CHORF,” and finally “Social Justice Warriors.”

Trufan

Trufan is the funny one, so let’s start there. Both Wired and Popular Science have latched on to it. It’s been around a while, but starting in February 2015, Sad Puppy supporters Sad Puppies started use it as shorthand to defend themselves against the claims that they’re not “real fans.”

Only one problem with that: I can’t find any evidence that more than one person ever made that claim.

I don’t know who that one person was, but I do know that they made it in the comments thread of some post or another. Somebody apparently accused a blogger named Patrick Richardson of not being a true fan, and he defended himself in the blog post “Not a Real Fan.”

However, I can’t find the accusation itself. The only thing I can find is a conversation in the comments thread. One person asked what had sparked this post, and Patrick Richardson replied that Larry Correia had been labeled “not part of fandom.” Another person then said, “I can find plenty of examples of Larry *claiming* people called him not a real writer or not a real fan. What seems thin on the ground is actual pages where people *did* so.” Author John C. Wright, Puppy supporter and beneficiary, then replied, “The comment that sparked this was in a private email which the recipient is unwilling to reproduce publicly.”

So the accusation of which Patrick Richardson was complaining came in a private email from one person to another.

Next up was a post by blogger Mike Glyer saying with the ultimate message that (1) if you try to attach yourself to fandom, you are a fan; and (2) you don’t need anyone’s permission to be there. The post, “Why You’re Not a Fan” began ironically, however, with a silly list of qualifications you must hold to be a fan. You have to read fanzines, join a club, own Star Wars action figures, join a Bardic Circle, AND do cosplay.

This irony is over-the top and obvious. Who could possibly meet these qualifications? It’s obvious, that is, unless you’re expecting a fight. And some people were, so the Internet exploded with outraged bloggers, from Bob Colfax’s “So I’m Not Cool Enough to be a Fan” to Brad Torgersen’s “My FANifesto.”

That’s “trufan” in a nutshell: a tempest in a teapot.

CHORF

Next up, CHORF. The etymology is simple. Puppy leader Brad Torgersen coined it in March 2015 to mean “Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics.” It was first used to refer to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, after an argument in the comment thread of “Distant Thunder, and the Smell of Ozone.” It is now broadly applied to a larger group of people.

Social Justice Warrior

“Social Justice Warrior,” like “CHORF,” is used broadly. The term has been around since at least 2009, when the Will Shetterley began the blog Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage. It’s also been used (very rarely) by activists to refer to themselves.

But in 2014, Gamergate happened. That was a backlash against female video game programmers and players. It appears to have been orchestrated by a small number of Twitter users, who also strategically planned the use of hashtags such as #notyourshield. The term “Social Justice Warrior” and its shorthand “SJW” was officially intended to apply to the worst form of Internet troll, but in actual usage it applied broadly to anybody who disagreed with Gamergaters. This meant that Gamergaters could imply somebody was a troll without actually saying so. Also, naming somebody as a warrior provided a pretext for attacking them.

In 2015, the term it made its way into the science fiction and fantasy blogosphere. Here are a couple of examples.

For the last several years, a vocal minority of Social Justice Warriors has wrecked havoc on the fabric of the science fiction community. Taking their clues from the Alinskyite “direct action” tactics of far-left political activists, they’ve carried out a virulent campaign against anyone unwilling to toe the political correct line on victimhood identity politics.

The issue with the Social Justice Warrior contingent isn’t just that they’ve got their causes, it is that they take those causes and use them to brow beat not only their opposition, but also the innocent bystanders, the undecided, and newcomers.

When a person uses the term “Social Justice Warrior,” it looks to me like they’re trying to start a fight. When a mass media journalist uses it, they’re setting the stage for that fight and taking a side. For example, here’s a quote from the Wired article “Who Won Science Fiction’s Hugo Awards and Why It Matters”:

But from the start, Correia had some serious complaints. He felt that the Hugos had become overly dominated by what he and others call “Social Justice Warriors,” who value politics over plot development.

It was lazy journalism to use the term without trying to provide an actual definition. I get why it happened, though: there isn’t a definition. Social justice warriors are [who?] who do [what?] That question can’t be answered.

What to do?

When faced with words like these, it helps to have a critical eye and a handle on what’s being implied and what’s being hidden. It’s worth the time to look for more accurate replacements and advocate for their use. For example, “Social Justice Warriors” means “left-leaning Internet troll” in some cases and “feminist” in others. And finally, hold the mass media accountable.

Today I’ll look at the way the Wired article is slanted in favor of some sub-genres and against others. This is a common error: many readers and reviewers have an unconscious hierarchy, and if a work doesn’t match up to the expectations of a favored sub-genre, then they consider the work itself to be inferior. People often do this without even noticing sub-genres exist.

And the hierarchy? Going by what I’ve heard many people say, it starts off with hard sci fi, space opera, military sci fi, cyberpunk, and then everything else. I’ve often heard it said that you can’t write sci fi unless you get the science right.

I don’t give a crap about the hierarchy. Personally, I prefer science fantasy, contemporary and urban fantasy, time travel, and space opera — but I’ll read anything that strikes my fancy. I also understand that even if I don’t like a work, that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

The Wired article does have an unacknowledged hierarchy. Most obviously, as I mentioned yesterday, it keeps forgetting the Hugo awards include fantasy. I’ll repeat the quote here:

[T]he balloting had become a referendum on the future of the genre. Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?

Meanwhile, according to the article, the genre has Gods, and they are:

These are all highly influential authors from a certain era, often called “The Golden Age” of science fiction. Here’s a look at the sub-genres they wrote in:

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) wrote hard sci fi. His Robot series introduced robots with a self-contained system of rules that was intended to protect humans, and then broke it. His Foundation series reached forward into the far future and chronicled a dying empire.

Harlan Ellison (1934-present) writes in a variety of genres including speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy.

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) wrote postmodern, philosophical works that often included authoritarian governments and altered states of consciousness.

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) wrote a wide variety of sci fi on a great number of themes, from rockets to free love to libertarian governments.

According to the Wired article, those sub-genres represent the pinnacle of SF/F in the past. Which sub-genres might it propose for the present and the future?

Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?

Does this “broader sci-fi” fit into any of the categories I listed earlier? No, it does not. Let’s add a new one: feminist sci fi. It’s not a sub-genre unto itself, though. It always intersects with another one. For example, I never sit down and say, “Okay! Today I’m going to write feminist sci fi!” No, I say, “Today I’m going to write about time travel and clones!” And it’s feminist because I have a feminist world view.

Feminist sci fi isn’t some upstart newcomer, by the way. The first feminist sci fi was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818. It’s about creating human life outside the womb, and it’s about prejudice and “othering.” Oh yeah, and that new life has feelings.

The above quotation refers to feminist sci fi but follows the lead of the Sad Puppies in omitting the word “feminist.” And it follows the lead of the Sad Puppies in failing to acknowledge that feminist sci fi could be about anything other than feminism. Finally, it denigrates feminist sci fi in subtle ways, by repeating what the Sad Puppies have said without providing any counterarguments.

For example:

But from the start, Correia had some serious complaints. He felt that the Hugos had become overly dominated by what he and others call “Social Justice Warriors,” who value politics over plot development. Particular targets of Puppy derision include . . . Ann Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice, whose protagonists do not see gender. Leckie conveys this by using female pronouns throughout.

Wow, an entire novel just about female pronouns, that values the politics of female pronouns over plot development? Actually, no. Ancillary Justice is an exploration of a far-future empire, following in the footsteps of Asimov’s Foundation series. And it’s about human-AI-machine hybrids. The genre here is not SJW politics but hard sci fi. The female pronouns? I’ve read so much feminist sci fi that I barely noticed them.

The article goes on to quote Sad Puppy leader Torgersen as saying:

“they’re like: ‘Ooh, we can vote for this author because they’re gay, or for this story because it’s got gay characters,’ or, ‘Ooh, we’re going to vote for this author because they’re not white.’ As soon as that becomes the criteria, well, quality goes out the window.”

The author doesn’t question the assertion that quality goes out the window. Nor does she counter a quote it gives from a Puppy supporter at Sasquan as saying some science fiction has a certain academic torpor and is self-indulgent and unreadable. That amounts to tacit approval of a Puppy view of literature.

To sum up, the hierarchy of genres in this article has hard sci fi at the top and feminist science fiction and literary fiction and fantasy at the bottom.

Mentions of white authors greatly outnumbered mentions of people of color.

The list of people who had won Hugos that appeared at the beginning of the article included only white men. Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Connie Willis–women and people of color who have also won Hugos–had to wait until the very end, after the leaders of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, people who gave up Hugo nominations, Pancho Villa, MC Escher, Darth Vader, Churchill, FDR, and Stalin.

This isn’t unusual. This is same-old, same-old, an everyday erasure of diverse voices. It’s the sort of thing that happens when a journalist goes with the flow in the midst of a backlash. Worth pointing out, but let’s move on. I have two more interesting erasures to look at.

Here’s an obvious one that I bet most everybody missed.

[T]he balloting had become a referendum on the future of the genre. Would sci-fi focus, as it has for much of its history, largely on brave white male engineers with ray guns fighting either a) hideous aliens or b) hideous governments who don’t want them to mine asteroids in space? Or would it continue its embrace of a broader sci-fi: stories about non-traditionally gendered explorers and post-singularity, post-ethnic characters who are sometimes not men and often even have feelings?

There’s a word missing here, and that word is fantasy. The Hugo awards are for science fiction and fantasy. So this article that is supposedly about the future of the genre has left out half.

Oops.

What else has been left out? Well, let’s look at the choice given in the paragraph I just quoted. It’s between white men with ray guns fighting aliens and mean governments and stories about diverse characters with feelings.

This is really just a fancy rephrasing of the Sad and Rabid Puppies claims that anything with diversity is just about identity politics.

No way, nohow.

Believe it or not, authors who include diverse characters also include diverse plots and new ideas. Feelings are only one aspect of a genre that is constantly pushing boundaries, always going bravely “where no one has gone before.”

Just off the top of my head . . .

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein asks us: what happens when human beings use science to play God?

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower gives us a possible vision of life-after-apocalypse, and her trilogy Lilith’s Brood explores not only the complexities of interspecies mating but also the way they’re affected by a differential of power.

Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed shows us a vision of a post-capitalist world and then questions her own utopia.

Amy Thompson’s The Color of Distance dives into the hard science of ecosystems.

Nnedi Okorafor’s book of short stories Kabu-Kabu invites us to jump into a taxicab driven by a magical madman and then cheats us of the kind of endings we have been conditioned to expect.

Molly Gloss’ Dazzle of Day gives us a spaceship with plausible physics — one that didn’t break the speed of light.

Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren presents an apocalypse that breaks time and space, with a book that breaks the genre.

I would suggest that anybody who reads books like these and sees only identity politics is missing out. These books represent an ever broadening horizon of new life, new civilizations, and new ideas.(1) They help us understand the world in a different way, see possible consequences of new technologies, look at different options for the running of human society. In short, they’re the future of science fiction and fantasy.

1. You might be asking, “But what about the menz? Are you saying they can’t have diverse plots and fresh ideas?” On the contrary: white male authors moved beyond ray guns decades ago. I just finished rereading Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber and gorged myself on the setting, which was so vivid it turned into one of the most compelling protagonists I’ve ever met. Short of Robert Holdstock’s worlds, that is. Meanwhile, China Mieville gets an A+ for the antihero in UnLunDun. And I will never look at parasites the same way again, after devouring Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps. Don’t even get me started on what Steven Moffat and Neil Gaiman did for Doctor Who. And then there’s George Orwell, whose dystopia 1984 is one of my three favorites.

I have a lot to say about the Hugo awards, but even more to say about the discourse surrounding the Hugo awards. Let’s start with the Wired article, “Who Won the Hugo Awards and Why it Matters.” For an objective-seeming article, they sure did give a lot of air time to Theodore Beale and the Sad Puppies. They reduced the various arguments over the aesthetics of science fiction to identity politics. And they privileged male voices over female ones.

Don’t take my word for all that, though. Wired is for geeks, yes? Let me be a geek for a moment and give you a word frequency analysis. Here’s a list of words sorted by frequency. (Many of the “little words” like articles and prepositions have been removed, and where the same word was used the same number of times, they’re listed in the order in which they appeared in the article.)

Enjoy.

(74 to 30 words)

He is I who Puppies

(29-20 words)

people are said have with it not been they his Beale be was like Hugo

(19-10 words)

their Sad Hugos had We about one me has she no When because more just were you Martin all I’m don’t up some fiction winners sci-fi want Best doesn’t which says other white Would Awards into out Her from Torgersen told very Bellet

(9-5 words)

year what science New it’s nominated those most Writer them Story Black Puppy Correia can then going go first Day fans women ballot writers Though After much even author blog will him say got My mean nomination Award among fantasy come authors time Past years many male While Rabid few where before John ever over Worldcon room did also man novel made same we’re woman how that’s get asked something think being enough back Losers

(4-3 words)

SINCE future words too nominees voters World night often Puppies? there Short won us understand know goes way year-old see really two gay do book against thinks Both books merely called saying they’re he’s Vox considered reason once Jemisin consider every away political little win winner down withdrew Sasquan Three-Body Problem dream love trophy voted include genre color three final movement broke felt voting number Puppygate record Convention announced question popularity slates February categories W Campbell its history sometimes men vote Game wasn’t fan turned rocket Editor Mixon winning female There’s here ways our matter Puppies’ Brad Why novelist phone name named politics person whose Times racist actually popular need stuff himself slate son American example point if around half-savage including anyone gets let idea still any certain replaced Now attempt sense read write Annie together sister own honor Martin’s too? give Liu translator Cixin Liu’s Novel-winning don rubber coneheads Alfie